23 Minutes Read Online Free PDF Page A

time. Once she has started a playback, she can stop partway through and return to the same starting time—up to ten repeats if she so chooses—which is why she thinks of this time as being in flux. It isn’t permanently set until the full twenty-three minutes are over. At which point, that particular twenty-three-minute segment of time—she thinks of it as a story line—solidifies? Closes off? In any case, that whole block of time is permanently no longer available to her fiddling. The story moves on …
    But Zoe has no intention of fiddling with this playback. She has one easy goal—although for that her deadline is much shorter than twenty-three minutes. She probably wasted a good five minutes after the shooting, and there had to be six or seven minutes before that when the bank robber was already out of control.
    Ten minutes, Zoe estimates. She has ten minutes to contact the police and warn them about a robbery in progress. Zoe doesn’t especially like police. Being in the system, she has had several encounters with them and feels that the best of them are perhaps good-hearted but ineffectual, and the worst made the career choice to justify being bullies. Still, they’re professionals. To be fair, they’reprobably better trained to deal with armed felons than with socially disadvantaged teens. The police should be able to prevent anyone from getting killed. And by anyone , she has in mind customers or even bank staff. She is not such an altruist as to be particularly concerned about a thief who would bring a gun into a bank and be prepared to use it.
    She wipes her hands on her jeans, unable to rid herself of the sensation that they are speckled with the blood of two dead men. Even though she can see they are not.
    Zoe looks around. From what she has heard, there used to be pay phones scattered throughout the city, available for those who needed to contact somebody before cell phones were invented. She supposes there probably still are pay phones somewhere, but she doesn’t have time to search one out.
    She sees a girl who looks about her own age, though Zoe suspects that, without makeup, she herself looks younger than she really is, perhaps closer to junior high than high school. Still, here’s a girl who is probably about fifteen or sixteen, very chic in a short skirt and high heels that would never be good for a quick getaway—for whatever that’s worth—and who is talking on a cell phone.
    â€œExcuse me,” Zoe says, falling into step next to her. “I don’t have a phone and I absolutely need to make a call. It’s an emergency. May I please borrow yours?”
    The girl looks up at her as though she has never, ever, in her entire life, had anyone ask for such an outrageous favor. She tells the person at the other end of the call, “Just a sec,” then says to Zoe, “I don’t have, like, an unlimited plan.”
    â€œOK,” Zoe counters. “But this is, like, literally life-and-death.”
    Without answering, the girl turns abruptly to enter a gift shop.
    Zoe considers following her in, but decides against it. If the girl is frightened of her—or even just annoyed by her—and if she complains to the shopkeeper, there’s no question with which of them the people in the shop will sympathize.
    Instead, she looks around some more. There are a couple of young guys, wearing uniforms from a fast-food place, who are sitting on the edge of one of the huge sidewalk planters. They are talking and texting and laughing, but Zoe dismisses them because there is always such a chance of misunderstanding where guys are concerned. Similarly, she doesn’t give serious consideration to the grandfatherly guy walking the big dog that looks as though it could eat small children for a snack, or to the biker guy who has a Chihuahua at the end of his leash. She spots a woman walking with a girl and a boy, both preteens, and she